IT’S TIME TO SPEAK UP FOR SERIES ON THE ‘BUBBLE’
If the stars of Timeless could go back in their time machine as NBC executives, what would they do? “I would have picked us up for three seasons,” quips Abigail Spencer, a star of the time-travel series, one of several shows this season with uncertain futures. NBC already has committed to a second and third year of This is Us, fall’s biggest new hit. But for Timeless and 23 other scripted series on network TV, it’s a waiting game for six more weeks, until the major broadcast networks unveil their new schedules and reveal how many of this year’s holdovers will make the cut.
USA TODAY's 20th annual Save Our Shows poll asks you to pick which shows hovering “on the bubble” between renewal and cancellation deserve another season — and which belong in TV's scrap heap. The list includes new series like Timeless, Pitch and The Great Indoors; sagging veterans such as 2 Broke Girls and Elementary; spring entrants Trial & Error, Imaginary Mary and just-premiered Prison Break; and Quantico, The Catch and Code Black, each hoping for a third season. Producers of several of these series will tout their strengths and suggest new storylines in meetings this month aimed at securing new seasons.
And while most new series fail, 14 freshmen are expected back, including Bull, Lethal Weapon and American Housewife.
Nielsen ratings and network assessments of creative quality once were the primary barometers of which series survived. But in recent years, as streaming services began paying handsomely for reruns, networks have tended to heavily favor shows they own, and use profits — rather than ratings — as a primary yardstick. And the steady rise in delayed viewing, on TV and online, makes it much harder to make snap judgments about a series’ potential. While immediate viewership for Timeless was low, it ranked as NBC’s No. 4 scripted series once viewing up to 35 days later is counted, “a stat I’ve never heard of until NBC publicized it,” says executive producer Shawn Ryan.
While networks’ ad-dollar haul isn’t as high for that long-term viewing, it indicates growing fan interest, which also helped NBC comedy Superstore earn an early renewal.
“Our show is very much a Rorschach test about what new metrics in television mean,” Ryan says. “If it’s true that it doesn’t matter when the viewers come to a show, I feel pretty confident we’ll be back. If the old metric still rules the day, then I guess maybe we might not.”
Spencer says the spring uncertainty goes with the territory: She says she’s appeared in eight pilot episodes for new series “that never saw the light of day.”
The same goes for her co-star, Malcolm Barrett: “From my very first TV show, I was already ready for it to be canceled,” with “an understanding that’s it’s not always immediately appreciated. If the worst criticism is that it was ahead of its time, then I’m OK with that as a legacy.”